Friday, December 6, 2013

After NaNo

November has evolved into an energizing -- and perhaps exhausting -- month for writers across the United States. It is the month of NaNoWriMo (NaNo, for short), or National Novel Writing Month.  A formal non-profit organization formed in 1999 to promote literacy, fun, and fellowship and over the past fourteen years has evolved into a wildly dispersed grassroots group of writers, networked via social media. More than 300,000 formally participated in the group's primary activity, which is to write a novel of at least 50,000 words in 30 days, and most likely thousands of others participated on an informal basis. Those who registered at the official NaNo site were able to post updates on word counts, receive motivational pep talks, and take advantage of a range of free or deeply discounted tools, resources, and gifts for writers.

I first joined in the effort in 2010, and did succeed in writing a respectable first draft of a novel based on tarot card readings I did for a variety of people during that November. I have not looked at that draft since November 30, 2010, but I do have a copy on my hard drive and would like to go back to it some day.

My efforts in 2011 and 2012 ended in failure. This year, however, I succeeded, though I did not write a novel, as I will explain below. The thrill of the success lay in what I learned and have since put into practice about the life of a writer who also maintains a day job. I will get into these details shortly. First, however, I want to talk about the failures.

I failed in 2011 and 2012 for two reasons: I am not a fiction writer, and I do not write as a hobby. What is insightful to me was that those reasons for failure ended up being the reasons I succeeded in 2013. Knowing at the outset that I was not going to write fiction and that no matter how enjoyable writing is for me, it is first and foremost work and not play helped me marshall the energy of a supportive community of hundreds of thousands of people -- most of whom I never will meet -- in engaging in a shared experience of putting words down to page.

So the thrill of success.

After my 2012 failure, I began to ask questions: Did I fail because I could not write fiction? Did I fail because my job was overwhelming me? Did I fail because I had too many other projects on my plate? Or, perhaps, was the real reason for failure the lack of commitment to writing as an essential component of my work?

Pondering these questions made me realize that the last of these four questions cut to the heart of the matter. The question of whether one can or cannot write fiction is ridiculous. Anyone who writes can make up a story, and whether a "novel" drafted during National Novel Writing Month actually is a work of fiction or a work of non-fiction or even poetry is largely irrelevant. Nobody is looking at what the words on the page actually say, except for the writer herself. And even the writer is probably not going to look until at least a month or two later when he is ready to start editing the work. The goal is to write words. The genre is up to you.

Questions two and three -- overwhelm at the office and too many other projects on the plate -- could be legitimate reasons for the failure if the writer did not see the work of the office and the other projects as part and parcel of her writing experience. I am fortunate. I happen to have a job that requires a lot of daily writing on topics, thoughts, and projects related to matters of the heart and mind. So overwhelm can easily be managed if the job and the work of writing become intertwined. Other projects have a similar characteristic to office overwork. For many of us, projects are a way of life: We always have them. They have deadlines that need to be met. And, more often than not, they require writing. And, if you're selective about the projects you choose to take on, they, too, can become integral aspects of the writing life.

And, so, the question of commitment. On the last day of December 2012, I made a great resolution and publicly announced it on Facebook as the "grandmother" of all 2013 resolutions. The resolution was that I would be a writer: I would think like a writer, I would act like a writer, and I would behave exactly as a professional writer of my age and level of experience ought to be behaving.

So what did all mean? As I entered 2013, I felt that, for me at least, being a writer meant writing with a more sustained daily commitment than the three pages of longhand stream-of-consciousness minimum that was asked of morning pages. It meant writing at least a certain number of words every day, developing a work plan for a project list and seeing it through, and most importantly it meant putting submissions into the mail. It also meant learning all that I could as part of my busy life schedule about the art and craft of writing and it meant tapping into whatever amassed collective energy I could find among other writers to harness for my own strength.

Like many New Year's resolutions, this one didn't exactly get off to a rousing start. I also entered the New Year as a freshly-minted non-drinker (which created some personal struggles) and I was involved with many projects that I came to realize over time were draining -- not replenishing -- my creative and writerly sources. Unlike most New Year's resolutions, however, this one has resulted in what I would call success. The year ends with me writing every day -- seriously, every day -- a minimum of 750 and often more like 1,000 to 1,500 words, usually on a specific project that I am developing. Each day starts with an examination of my project list and an assessment of what work s needed. And I am now submitting an average of two or three pieces a month, compared with fewer than that for a year.

How did NaNo help me change? For starters, it challenged me to increase my daily word count. Over the past year, I read interviews with or articles by many prolific writers about their personal writing practices, and took advantage of such things as readings or workshops to query many writers, as well. I learned through this investigation that most writers have a daily time set aside for writing -- usually during a realistic time of the day -- when external distractions are minimal, and that they use this time to get most of their writing done. Most have a daily word-count goal of 1,000 to 2,000 words that they strive to reach, and most know how long it will take them to write that number of words, on average. Most also only write for a maximum of three hours a day, though I did read an article where Stephen King claimed to write five or six hours a day -- whatever it took, he claimed, to reach 2,000 words. I started to use a website called 750words.com in April, and quickly discovered that I could write 750 words in an average of about 26 to 40 minutes. I also discovered that I hated getting an e-mail from the site administrator saying that I had failed in the month's challenge, which was something that had occurred when I tried using the site initially, first in September 2012 and then in November of that year. When I started in April, I resolved that every e-mail I received from "Buster," the site's administrator, would be one applauding me for my success. So far, that's been the case. I figured that if I could write 750 words in 40 minutes, I could write 2,000 words in slightly less than two hours. So I set that figure as a daily goal for the month of November. It ended up being more of an average daily than an each-day daily, with some days coming in at just the 750 minimum of 750words.com and some days netting over 4,000 words.

NaNo also helped me channel my multiple projects into a unified whole. I started the month thinking that I could write each day on my still-needing-to-be-completed book manuscript, on my hip-hop research, and on "other things". I did not write on each of these projects every day. Rather, I wrote on one for two or three days, then switched to a different project for a breather. I mainly alternated between the book manuscript and hip-hop research; however, I discovered that about every seven or eight days, my brain begged for a chance to try something entirely different. And so I gave myself permission to take days off and used those days to create stories for the multiple blogs I began maintaining over the past year and other things.

In November, I also discovered a Facebook group that posts calls for literary submissions. I began using this group as an almost daily resource to submit poems and short stories that I had developed over the past year. As my submission pace picked up, I began to realize that I could deploy the same tactic for the longer, slower academic essays that I also like to write. I have never been comfortable with submitting my work, but the supportive environment of the Facebook group participants have encouraged me considerably.

The final way that NaNo helped me was by letting me triage or refuse to commit to projects that were not supporting my writing practice, simply by showing me that if  wanted to devote two or three hours a day to writing, a few hours a week to making submissions, and a few hours a week to reading in order to seek out fresh ideas and be current on both news and academic developments, I simply could not let the time and energy I put into my office work and projects expand beyond a certain number of hours in the week. I also could not allow myself to get invested in other people's "issues and anxieties" or in institutional debates that had no easy answer. So, I adopted a strategy of writing at home (with my phone plugged in upstairs, out of site and out of hearing distance) for a few hours in the early morning, devoting time in the office to the necessary work-related projects, and making sure to depart at an early enough hour to get in a workout, dinner with my husband, time with my cats, and another hour or so with my computer.

The month of November has spilled into December. Light snowflakes are flying and a pile of projects awaits. I could feel overwhelmed. Instead, I feel calm and organized. I have a plan and I have the discipline. I feel like I can call this all being a writer.

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Navigating time


I am returning to my "day job" in a couple of weeks, following what my college calls a "reassignment." The reassignment is like a mini-sabbatical that offers one a chance to release one's self from daily duties of the workplace in order to delve more deeply into a long-term project. I feel in some ways that I never left my day job entirely, as I felt that it was still important to attend some -- though definitely all -- meetings and to be responsive to the students for whom I serve as mentor. This situation -- coupled with deadlines for long writing projects that were not completed earlier -- sort of frittered the reassignment time away. Still, I feel that I got more accomplished than I would have if I hadn't had this release time, and learned some things about when, where, and how I write best. Most significantly, the time off gave me a mental and emotional refresher, and I find that as November nears, I am looking forward to being back on the job full time.

So what did I learn about writing that might be useful to pass on?

For starters, I discovered that a three-stint approach seems to work well for me, and is something that I might be able to continue with my life when I am back to work full-time.

I have described in previous posts my years of doing "morning pages." These three pages of longhand writing form the core of Julia Cameron's Artist's Way philosophy, and are aimed at first clearing out the "mental junk" that's keeping one from doing real, serious creative work and two getting to the creative work itself. I have fifteen years of history now as evidence that the practice works -- for me, at least. I have drafted syllabi, roughed out papers, written poetry and prose, and pushed numerous now-published pieces forward simply through the doing of morning pages.

What I have found, however, is that the morning pages do not necessarily lead all the time to the actual doing of creative work. The pages take 42 minutes for me to write when I am working at my fastest, and sometimes a couple of hours when I'm deep into a train of thought that I don't want to let go of. I can close the notebook at the end of that two hours feeling a sense of accomplishment over having broken through a block or having worked out something that was bothering me. But the bottom line is that longhand writing in our 21st century society is incomplete. If you want to save what you have written, you have to type it up. Typing is time-consuming, especially as it often means editing along the way. Typing also can be tedious, and I'm the type of person who finds ways to put off doing that which will be tedious. Hence, great ideas or good thoughts might sit in my notebook for days or weeks, before finding their way into the essay that I'm working or the other longer piece.

I decided to try a second tactic beginning last April, which was to free-write nightly at a site known as 750Words.com. The site's organizers -- Buster and KelliAnne (at least these are the names they use on the site) -- set it up as a free space where users could do morning pages in an electronic format. If you sign on, you receive a daily e-mail urging you to write and a congratulatory note after you've done the work. Silly as it seems, those e-mails have a powerful effect. I have written every night for 197 days straight, and about 90 percent of the short pieces that I've produced have found their way into blogs or other spaces.

However, 750Words.com has its drawbacks, too, at least in the manner in which I've been using it. It's great for creating what I'll call "one-hit wonders" -- short pieces that can spew from heart-to-head-to hands on keyboard with minimal pain. But, from my perspective, it doesn't lend itself easily to longer-term projects. It's all about what can be begun, developed, and concluded in one sitting. Unlike the pen-and-paper notebook, it doesn't seem to work quite well in terms of allowing one to pick up the next day what was started earlier.

Some of this might be because I almost always do the 750Words.com writing at night -- after a day of work, running, cooking and enjoying dinner with my spouse. The writing occurs as I am relaxing, and reflecting on what has occurred that day. It's about closure, about ending so I can start again tomorrow -- not with something that trailed off in the middle but with something new. I like writing and sharing the quick hit pieces on my blogs, and the small but fairly loyal audience that I've been able to attract seems to like these pieces, too. So, I'd like to keep them. Which brings me to the three-stint approach.

If morning pages are a preparation for a day and 750Words.com is a culmination of the day, the middle section of the day is essentially the day itself. One might think of that middle time as the eight-hour work day, where one prepares a to-do list and tries to carry it out as best as possible. Often, of course, the work day means personal aspirations are set aside because "the stuff" that one must do to serve the collectives with which one affiliates comes up. For me, that stuff is grading, responding to e-mails, troubleshooting problems that arise, completing tasks, and, yes, meeting with others. It also means, however, things like bringing in the harvest, paying bills, making sure I get my workouts in, and doing my share of what needs doing at home.

Technically, I was supposed to be free of the work obligations at least over the past two months. Realistically, I wasn't free because needs keep arising. "Stuff" -- both at work and at home -- often is rooted in relationships. To keep the relationships strong, one can step back but not tune out. What I learned as the time ticked on was that I actually was okay with that, as long as I was able to get in a third stint of writing at least two or three days a week. I also learned that these stints follow a law of diminishing returns. Unless you're in the fervor of the almost-finished (as I was last night and stayed up gladly until 2:25 a.m. to push to the end), you're probably going to get more done in two or three hours of writing than in a whole day devoted to nothing but the page. There are exceptions to that rule, of course, such as the enormous amount of writing that I can accomplish when I'm fortunate enough to be locked up in a hotel room or at a retreat center and am able to receive all meals, no Internet, and anything else I need. But the regular norm seems to suggest: do the two or three hours, then get up.

I am fortunate to have a job as a faculty member for an online learning center within an accredited and respected college. The characteristics of my job mean that "stuff" happens all the time, around-the-clock, 24/7, and because of that, I can organize my day around so that I write in a non-negotiable way. The challenge is living up to one's own commitments and not allowing that which was defined as non-negotiable to be negotiated away. And, so, for the next few months, as I return to work in a full-time way, my plan is to enact the three-stint day: morning pages, 750words at night, and two to three non-negotiable hours of writing at least three times a week in the middle of the day. I'll keep you posted on how it progresses.

Saturday, August 17, 2013

Organizing Principles

(This post also appears on my blog, Hip-Hop America, accessible at http://hip-hopamerica.blogspot.com)


I'm attending the Rensselaerville Writers Festival as I write this post, and during a morning workshop, a reference to walking came up. Workshop facilitator Peter Trachtenberg was leading us through an exercise of discovering affiliations and passions, and points and places in life where those affiliations and passions converge. He suggested -- in a delightful way in which he hinted that the idea had just come to him -- that this is the point where one should begin to write.

I loved the suggestion because I realized that one affiliation and one passion on my list converged with a point and a place in life that would help me wrap up my writing on my soon-to-be completed book manuscript, and that a second affiliation and passion converged with the same place but a different point in a way that might provide the perfect entry point for my second book project. What's relevant to this essay is that the place of convergence in both instances was Seattle, which brings me to walking.

Writing workshops usually include a certain amount of sharing among participants, either of writing generated in prompts during the workshop or of work prepared beforehand to be brought in for discussion. The only writing we did in this workshop was the lists of affiliations, passions, points, and places so that's what we shared. Time was short so we were only allowed to share one.

When a participant shared walking as a passion, I realized that walking also was a passion for me even though I hadn't put it on my list (opting for running and bicycling and swimming more generally). I also realized that it underscored the passion I did share out loud -- making things myself, creating something out of nothing -- that I shared, and that walking was tied up intrinsically in the affiliation I shared, of writer. Walking also took me to Seattle, which was the place where I realized that many years earlier I had begun walking first as a matter of course, then as a vehicle for discovery, which evolved into curiosity and inquiry, and ultimately into an organizing principle for life. Trachtenberg suggested that when something becomes an organizing principle in life, it can serve also as a guiding force for writing, moving the pen and the narrative through rain, snow, sunshine, clouds, sleet, and wind toward destinations that might be unknown at the moment but become clearer as the principle's organizing logic unfolds.

I think I can trace the start of my walking to an impulse that has kick-started many other endeavors in life: a desire to be less wasteful and to save money. I used to work at The Seattle Times and paid $20 a month (yes, seriously, in 1989, that is how much I paid) to park my car in a lot three blocks from the newsroom. At some point, the parking fee went up, and I decided that since I actually lived less than a mile from the newsroom, I could give up my parking spot and walk to work. I did need my car on days that I had interviews or other out-of-the-office commitments, but for years I was able to manage to find street parking anywhere from one to eight blocks from the newsroom.

At first, my walks were fairly straightforward treks down the hill from my apartment to the newsroom, but over time evolved into longer and wider breadths that took me across unfamiliar streets and into new neighborhoods. The walks sometimes helped me discover new styles of landscaping, new activities or new projects and translated from there into stories for the newspaper.

The practice stretched away from Seattle and into new cities that I would visit, both inside and outside the U.S. My boyfriend and I at the time often organized our weekend jaunts around walking treks and labeled ourselves urban walkers.

In graduate school in Honolulu, walking became a way to ease stress, to understand urban life in the islands, and often to get exercise. I remember one time period in 2000 when a series of life-changing events occurred, throwing me into a crisis of self-doubt. Walking through the crisis introduced me to people who began walking with me and sharing their stories of personal strife, of asking me to talk to them about Marxism and colonialism (after they found out I was a graduate student). Walking through the crisis also helped me save my own life. Walking in 2000 led to running, and to my first marathon.

When I moved back to Seattle in 2006 with my husband, we did so without a car. The 1988 Honda Civic that I had bought new when I had moved from Kansas City to Seattle died with 217,000 miles on its odometer and went to the Honolulu office of the National Kidney Foundation as a donation. A couple of other clunkers we owned briefly also went to the donate-able scrap heap. We figured we could get around Seattle with buses, bicycles, and our feet -- and until I began teaching in the outer suburbs of the city, we did. And even after we got a car -- a 1990 Volvo for $500 -- we continued to walk as much as we could.

The post-2006 walks got me through two more marathons, and numerous part-time and contract jobs. They opened my eyes constantly to changing conditions in the Seattle and to the shocking state of the devolution of daily life in our post-industrial era. They also exposed me to expressions of hope: plum trees growing in the inner-city, wild blackberries, public art of both the legal and illegal kind, impromptu music and dance, and ultimately hip-hop. Hip-hop artists showed me how, in a changing society, one could sustain a good life, reinvent one's self, and continue to create something new. In my head, I often felt like a parenting voice questioning the artists' motives: Shouldn't you be getting a "real job" with all that talent? Where is your passion for dance or for music going to lead? If I voiced the questions out loud, the artists would laugh and mutter something about eventually "teaching or leading workshops or doing something like that" when they had figured it all out. Truth was, they had sort of figured a lot of things out, and they were teaching me that I, the middle-aged professional struggling to pay a mortgage, that I could figure it out, too.

Three weeks ago, I went back to Seattle to reconnect with the city, some of the artists I had interviewed, and the manifestations of hip-hop I had discovered. My goal in going back was to begin pulling together ideas and materials for a book that would somehow weave together hip-hop, b-girls, race politics, Seattle, and my experience of being a part of the city. I knew even before I began planning the trip that I would walk. I would walk everywhere.  I would eschew rides from friends and rental cars. I would even avoid taking the bus as much as possible. I wasn't sure why I would be walking.

Today, I realized I walked then and I walk now because it is an organizing principle in life.

Thursday, August 8, 2013

Processes and Projects



I write this blog post one week before an agreed-upon deadline to complete revisions to a major writing project -- a book manuscript on which I've been working a decade. The manuscript began its life as a dissertation project and technically did not evolve into the book it is now until 2012. However, I began my academic career a couple of decades after I had begun my writing career so when I embarked on the writing of the dissertation, I did so with the full intention of turning it eventually into a book. The fact that the idea was radical -- "most dissertations don't deserve to be books" is the verdict of one "from dissertation-to-book" manual I read -- didn't occur to me, then or even now.

That I have a manuscript and a probable publisher makes me feel blessed.

Furthermore, the process of working on revisions to an already complete manuscript that are in response to reviewers' comments is much more enjoyable than the agony I endured last summer when I was trying to rewrite what had been a reasonably strong dissertation with a notable narrative voice into a manuscript that I thought would appeal to the academic press that had expressed interest in it without quite knowing what the publisher's acquisitions editor and its editorial collective would want. I found myself wondering more than once what had ever made me want to be a writer, as I floundered and blundered and cried and swore my way through four months of melodrama over writing processes, research practices, and questions of personal and professional ethics as I wondered how much I was obligated to share my work with those who had allowed me to interview them nearly a decade earlier. When I finally hit the send button for the electronic version, and put the final copy of the paper version into postal mail in early November, many thought I should celebrate. I mainly felt a deep sense of relief that the book and its subject matter would be two things that I would not have to think about for at least another two months. Academic publishers (as well as non-academic ones) have a standard practice of submitting manuscripts to external reviewers for critique on the text's scholarship and potential marketability, and I had been informed that the reviewers usually require about two months to complete their reading and commentary.

The two months passed, and I received the external reviews. I felt they were overwhelmingly positive, and supportive. The reviewers praised the manuscript's overall writing quality as well as the argument and manner in which I had framed my main points. They suggested several additions that I felt would strengthen the overall text and broaden both the quality of its scholarship as well as its readership appeal. Their suggestions helped me hone in on a question that had dogged me both through the writing of my dissertation and the production of the book manuscript: What was I actually trying to say?

That question still dogs me, as I write my way to the final steps of this stage. I try not to pay too much attention to it because I know uncertainty can paralyze me. At the same time, I wonder if the very uncertainty of what that closing note is going to be is the issue that prevents major projects from coming to completion.

In journalism, one learns that one needs a captivating opening paragraph (a "lede"), a statement of what your story is about (a "nut graf") and a provocative closing sentence or word ("kicker") that leaves the reader waiting to buy the paper the next day to search for your byline, eager to read more. Academic writing is somewhat similar in organization. One needs an introduction, a thesis statement, and a conclusion.

The difference between the two formats is that journalism relies primarily on the factual material about the story to hold it together while scholarship relies on the argument that the writer is putting forth. The quality of the writing is judged not only on the basis of its readability but more significantly on the level of new knowledge that the body of work produces. One can understand the stakes involved in academic writing in both positive and negative ways. Negatively, the assertion of a need for new knowledge can be seen as inferring that if you don't have anything fresh to contribute, you shouldn't be writing the work. More positively, one can see all writing -- and the process of writing -- as creating new knowledge because one person (or a pair or group of persons) is writing about the topic of interest from their unique perspective. As one of my dissertation advisors put it so well, you can't raise your second child exactly as you raised your first one because the very experience of having already raised one child will condition  the choices you make in raising the second.

Similarly, one of things I have learned about writing a dissertation and then writing a book is that the processes are significantly different. For a dissertation, the goal often is simply to finish -- "a good dissertation is a done dissertation" -- and to establish yourself as a credible scholar worthy of being awarded a doctorate. For a book manuscript, the goal is to communicate your thoughts and ideas to as broad an audience as possible and to advance new knowledge in the area in which you are writing while doing so.  The key distinction seems to rest on the same question: "What are you trying to say?"

The ability to form an argument is essential: "What is your perspective on this topic and why?" is  often a question I ask students in offering feedback on the first drafts of their work. The idea of an argument used to daunt me until I began to understand it as stemming from a personal relationship with the material you're writing about. When there's a personal stake, argumentation is easy. But closure then presents another issue. How do you disentangle yourself from the process of digging deep into your personal psyche to explore your relationship with your material so you can pack up your project and send it off to the publisher?

Many writers advocate writing your ending first. I cannot do that, because for me writing is about figuring out how you want things to end. What happens, however, when you get to the end and you still haven't figured it out? Is that the time to throw in the towel? My sense is that's the moment when you go back to where you began.

This morning, I met with my friend Michele. I was telling her that I felt that three stories in my book that dealt with differing religions captured the sentiment that I wanted to end with, that each were offering a way to understand citizenship, belonging, and democratic activism in an alternative, more intimate way.

       "Is that like having respect for difference?" she asked.

       "Yes, but it goes beyond respect. It's actually participating, engaging, mixing it up," I said. "That's what triggers a backlash, when people transgress."

       As I spoke, I realized that that was the question that first inspired me to explore the topic that lurks at the core of my book, long before I knew I was going to write a book -- or even an essay, let alone a dissertation -- about it. "People would tell me," I said to her, "that if Hindus and Muslims could just be left alone to do their own thing their own way, separately from each other, everything would work out. There wouldn't be any violence; everything would be just fine. My response was always, 'No. That's not right. That's not getting to know each other. That's separation, not integration."

       "Say that," she responded. "That's what it is."

Thursday, July 11, 2013

Writer's Block


A guest speaker in one of my Feminist Methods graduate seminars once described writer's block as a productive and fruitful time for the mind. Blocks, she explained, occurred when the brain was trying to wrestle out an important thought or issue. She always appreciated them because she knew when she was past the block, she would have written something great.

One question I have is this: When do you know that you're suffering writer's block? Might it just be that the piece you're trying to write just is not ready to write itself?

I began working on an essay Doing Hip-Hop in the Classroom in late August. By early January, a good three or four months after the desired due date, I had a first draft. I received comments on the first draft in February with a request to submit revisions in March. By late April, I knew I was struggling. I had a brief talk with the editors who were preparing the book for which the essay was aimed, and felt that I could work out the essay over the next couple of days.

A couple of days stretched into a couple of weeks, and then a couple of months. I tried again in early June, then mid-June, and late June, and for a couple of days in July. I thought I had nailed down at least a passable second draft, until two days ago when I looked at it again. Ugh. This afternoon, I wrestled with it for four and a half hours, and finally e-mailed the editors, suggesting that once again we talk.

In all fairness, I have to say that the essay is competing for my attention with a couple of other major projects, one of which is huge. Because it doesn't rank at the top of my priority list, I have considered apologizing to the editors and withdrawing from the project. I haven't done so because there's a piece of me that really wants to write this essay, to figure out what I am trying to make sense of in terms of what it means to learn through hip-hop and how to teach about hip-hop to others. I have started and stalled on this essay at least two dozen times. Something in there tells me that I have something I want to say. I just don't quite know how to say it yet.

I experienced a similar block last summer when I had set aside six weeks to revise my dissertation into a book manuscript. I felt as if I had everything going for me: support from my dean to write; an encouraging response from an acquisitions editor of a reputable press; and a schedule that I had cleared of all teaching, mentoring, service, and other writing commitments in order to write.

It was the most nightmarish six weeks of my life. The manuscript had seven chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion. I already had revised the introduction and first two chapters, so I figured that with six weeks, I could revise one chapter a week, and use the remaining week to proofread and give the full text a close review. After three weeks, I had revised one chapter. The process tore my heart out, and felt like a continual struggle. I cursed the wish I had made as a teenager to become a writer when I grew up, and walked around with a stressed-out panic look in my eyes the whole time. The second chapter took equally as long, and elicited just as much internal drama and external tears. By the end of the six weeks, I was pleading for more time. Clumsily, I managed to finish the manuscript and submit it to the publisher for consideration by the end of October.

This summer, the cycle repeats. The publisher sent the manuscript out for an external review, and the comments came back as positive. A contract and request for revisions arrived in the mail. The revisions have been painful and slow, but better than in the past. I can see as I re-read the manuscript and recall areas where I struggled that I was undergoing writer's block. I had some intricate, important points to make, and too much emotional baggage blocking me to see how best to articulate those points. The baggage is gone, and the edits -- so far -- are flowing.

Perhaps the same thing will happen with Doing Hip-Hop in the Classroom. I will look at it in a year, and see the light. Only I think I need that light to come in a day.

(Note on the image: It came from a fairly interesting writing site. The article itself that accompanied the image was about overcoming writer's block. Here is the link: http://litreactor.com/columns/7-strategies-to-outsmart-writers-block

Friday, June 21, 2013

The writing regimen


"You need to take charge of your writing career, because no one else will."

I don't remember the exact words that longtime freelance writer and writing instructor Wendy Call used, so my quotes are perhaps misplaced. But the gist of the advice is on target. It came back to me today, as I listened to two friends talk about how their jobs were wearing them down, robbing them of their creativity, running them ragged, and making them feel too frazzled and too distracted to write. I felt a little guilty as I heard them talk because I am coming off of an unprecedented four-week block of time where I have used several of my accumulated vacation days as well as a work trip to avoid the persistent pile of tasks at the office in order to indulge in three passions: writing, planting, and working out.

I did an amazing amount of indulging in all three over the past month.

And I feel great.

Let me describe the regimen I followed. It's fairly basic: Morning, rise and have coffee. Write for two to three hours and/or read work directly related to a writing project. Follow this with a two-hour workout, and then two to four hours in the garden. Drink a lot of water and eat a lot of fresh fruit while working outdoors, and don't forget the sunscreen. Afterwards, eat dinner, and write for one to two additional hours before going to bed.

During the work trip, which was an 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. work day (with an hour off for lunch, 12:15-1:15 p.m., on the dot), I woke up at 5 a.m. to write and read for writing each day, and did two workouts -- usually a run during the lunch break and a swim or bike ride between 5:30 and 7 p.m. After dinner, I worked in a night stint of writing, usually after calling my husband to check in on things at home.

It was not a difficult regimen. At home and away from home, I slept eight hours most nights and managed to have three healthy meals. Four weeks later, my skin is healthily tanned, and my body feels fit and trim. My attitude about my work is running high, and that's because the writing regimen was do-able, consistent, and somewhat forgiving.

In short, it worked.

I share the regimen because I know all too well the feeling of office overwork. One of the consequences of our post-industrial, twenty-first society's 24/7 pace is the fact that workers -- particularly those in the office, educational, and other high-tech sectors -- are essentially on the job all the time. (Yes, I, too, am guilty of waking up from a sound sleep to check the e-mail coming in on my smart phone at 3 a.m., and actually responding to a query despite the fact that the response could have waited till morning.) In the olden days -- before cell phones and e-mail, back in the 1980s -- I used to maintain a rigid separation between work and home. I did my best not to take work home with me. I did my best not to go into the office on my days off. Technology and a corresponding expectation of 24/7 availability has eroded my ability to maintain that separation. I'm not complaining, however, because the trade-off has been more flexibility in my schedule and more freedom to create what's often defined as work-life balance.

"I want to have a balanced life."

I remember saying that to Evelyne Raposo, a superbly supportive life coach type therapist who guided me through six years of doctoral work, emotional loneliness, flighty romances, and ultimately the lasting and highly loving relationship I have with the man who became my husband.

Evelyne's eyes lit up as I listed that statement as one of my goals for her work with me. For years, she worked with me to define what balance meant and how I could try and effect it on a day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month and year-to-year basis in a world where flux is the norm. What I learned from her was that imbalance creates stress. Stress produces a hormone called cortisol that can be hazardous to one's health, producing obesity, draining energy, and resulting in such ailments as hypertension.

Even though I was aware of the effects of imbalance, I felt incapable of creating a balance because it always seemed as if there was not enough. Not enough time. Not enough money. Not enough focus. Not enough clarity to get what I needed to get.

I finished my work with Evelyne as a success. I completed my doctorate, and I found the man of my dreams. We got married.

But imbalance took its tool. I will be on blood pressure and cholesterol medications probably for the rest of my life because stress eroded the strength of my heart, leaving me with hypertension. I was obese, and, at one point, at risk of developing diabetes.

These warning bells gave the words that Wendy Call uttered a new dimension: "You need to take care of your writing life because no one else will."

Today, at age fifty, I am no longer overweight. I write two times a day, and I exercise usually five or six days a week. I remain on blood pressure and cholesterol medications, but I am healthy, both physically and emotionally. My husband is on the same path to health as I am. We work together to build a life around gardening, exercise, and our creative pursuits -- writing for me, photography for him. At some point I realized that the pile-up of work at the office never really shrinks. One thing gets done; two other things move into its place. Needs and deadlines constantly haunt me, via e-mail, text messaging, and sometimes snail mail and phone calls.

Yet, I have found a way to walk away from the pile, knowing (or at least hoping) that "one more day" won't translate into the end of the world. I try to be as efficient as I can. But ultimately I walk away.

What allows me to walk away is the writing regimen I have adopted. It is balanced with a healthful blend of rest and activity, coupled with balance between home life and work life that is vital to one's existence.

So, I concur with Wendy. If you want to write, you must take control of your writing life. If you don't take care of your writing life, no one else will.

Saturday, June 1, 2013

The bad and beautiful first draft




After thirty days of writing poetry in April and thirty-one day of writing short stories in May, I find myself feeling thematically hooked on doing a late-night exercise of some sort and posting it to a blog. I don't want to self-promote this writing, particularly, but I do want to do it and I do want to share it. I'm not sure why, beyond the fact that there's something very powerful and self-affirming about putting your writing out into the world.

I learned a few lessons about the writing I did in April and in May, especially in May. To summarize:

1. Nightly check-ins with a set questionnaire are a pain in the neck. I disliked doing them, and dropped that piece of the May project after about two days. I realized that a check-in wasn't helping me write better. Instead, it was making me feel anxious and was taking up a lot of time. That experience tells me something about how self-assessments might feel for the students that I teach. Perhaps a check-in every three or four weeks makes sense. Every night or every week definitely does not.

2. Sticking to a single theme for an entire month also didn't work for me. I started off writing scenes related to my book-in-progress, then began to feel uncomfortable sharing these scenes publicly because they really were not stories in and of themselves but scenes that were meant to fit together in a larger work. I think I wrote some good scenes that will work well in the larger work, but I realized that I couldn't complete them in a single "throw-down-some-words" hour or two with the page.

After I dropped the idea of writing scenes related to my book project, I tried concentrating on themes that I think I would like to generate into books eventually such as the joys and challenges of teaching historical events live from the event itself and the adventures of my husband and myself in backyard gardening. The latter theme particularly resulted in several successful stories, but even that was a theme I couldn't sustain for more than a few days at a time. This experience also was quite instructive in how I teach writing and storytelling to students. Students in one of my classes -- Digital Storytelling -- maintain a story blog for a full semester. They're supposed to decide and then announce to the rest of the class early in the term what the blog is going is to be about. Many of them struggle with the assignment and lose their enthusiasm for blogging after making one or two posts. One thought is that one cannot really know what a blog is going to be about until one gets deep into the process of blogging itself. To that end, I was thrilled to find a different kind of challenge to take on for June. Developed by bloggers at Wordpress, it's called "Post Every Day", and includes a prompt for one to follow if you have no inspiration of your own. Since April 1, I have managed to write a minimum of 750 words each day, and to create a work of writing on 60 of the 61 days in April and May. So I figured that perhaps it might be time to see if I can blog every day, either on this site or on the Moving Your Body site. If it works, I might continue it through July, August, and beyond.

I might invite my Digital Storytelling students to try out the idea, as well.

3. The third insight that I gained from the April and May daily challenges is perhaps the most significant. I would articulate it as learning to trust my voice and giving myself permission to let some writing that is rough around the edges be made available via blog posts and Facebook status updates to a universe greater than me, my notebook, and my laptop. Most of the writing that I did for the challenges was done between 10 p.m. and midnight, at the end of my day. I simply couldn't make the space to do it any earlier in the day. As the weeks advanced, I also found myself realizing that I did not want to do it earlier. I liked the nightly ritual of settling down with a cup of tea or a glass of seltzer water and letting a story pour out. I felt as if the end-of-the-day routine liberated me from demands to polish, check facts, or ground assertions I was making in research. These habits, of course, are good and important habits, and they are ones that I practice diligently as I am working on more polished drafts. But they can stifle and inhibit a writer's voice from coming out, if they are allowed precedence over the quick-and-dirty, no-holds-barred first draft expression of the voice.

I hope to revise many of the writings I created in April and May, and already have submitted some of the poems I created for a possible reading this summer. It may take several years before all of this work is either revised or discarded, but that's the beauty of giving yourself freedom to create really bad first drafts. The drafts often aren't as bad as the writer thinks they are, and undoubtedly, they're also not as good. But it really helps to put them down, share them with a public, and receive feedback.

This is where I will conclude for now. Today's prompt from The Daily Post was to write about something ugly while also finding beauty or hope in one's thoughts. The ugly and the beauty, and, of course, the hope lie in the freedom to write first drafts.

Thursday, May 2, 2013

Day 2

Today, I read the second story in the Crossing into America anthology that I referenced yesterday. The story was "Our Papers," by Julia Alvarez (author of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents) and was  first published in 1988. It documents a young girl's memory of leaving the Dominican Republic for New York.

Strengths/insights of this story:
1. Alvarez develops her theme around a key word, "vacation." In doing so, readers gain a new understanding of what vacation means. The new meaning is insightful for me on a personal level as I consider what a vacation means personally. Is it fair to call time off from work to work on a book a vacation?
2. The detail surrounding a beach house is quite evocative. It takes me back to a time that I lived in India for a year.
3. The story also turns on the memory of the main character leaving for America. The children don't really understand that the departure is for good. This incident reminded me of living in India for a year, and how my parents prepared for the time without really involving us kids.

How I might use this story to develop my own writing:
I haven't written much about the time that we lived in India for a year, beyond an essay that ran in the  Seattle Times in 1992. It strikes me that the theme might be worth returning to, as I consider my own place in America and the world.

I haven't read any other works by this author. I would like to read How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents after reading this piece.

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

The Short Story Challenge Begins

My last post to this blog described an experiment in self-review that I planned to embark on in the month of May. The plan was to participate in National Short Story Month by reading a short story each day, and by writing a short story of my own. I also planned to analyze the story I read and reflect on my own writing process.

It is now the first of May, so here goes!

The story I read was actually an excerpt from an autobiographical work entitled Diary of an Undocumented Immigrant by Raul "Tianguis" Perez. It was included in an anthology Crossing into America: The New Literature of Immigration that is edited by Luis Mendoza and S. Shankar. I have had the anthology on my shelf for several years, ever since I took a graduate seminar with Shankar, and felt that with my own book manuscript on the South Asian immigrant experience currently undergoing a hefty revision, this would be an opportune time to delve into the anthology.

My assessment of the story:
1. What was the story I read? Title, author, place where it was published, and synopsis.
The story, as noted, was an excerpt from Raul Perez's autobiographical work Diary of an Undocumented Immigrant, published in 1991. The excerpt I read documents Perez's plans to enter the United States illegally as a "wetback," using the parlance of the late 1980s through 1990s, and describes his efforts to locate a coyote and means of getting across the border.

2. What were three strengths and/or insights that I gained about storytelling and writing from this particular story?
a) Perez tells a story that I am familiar with. Yet he does so in a manner that enlightens me to many aspects of the process of crossing the Mexican border into the United States illegally that I had not previously known. I learned specifically that the border crossing was a village practice more so than an urban one, and that people had gained knowledge of this practice largely by word of mouth.
b) Perez's storytelling style is both timeless and dated. He defines terms like coyote and bracero as if they are new to the American reading public. The publication date of 1991 might explain why. What gives the style a timeless strength, however, is the manner in which he loads explanation and historic detail onto the terms. One understands better how both terms developed in historical and political context.
c) I sense from the story that Perez has crossed the border before. He has not done it with the assistance of a coyote so he himself is embarking on a voyage of discovery in what he documents. I enjoy the narrative voice: it is simple, direct, non-judgmental and straightforward.
3. How do the strengths/insights I gained support my own efforts to improve my writing?
I often am asked to define terms like sari or samosa and I often find myself rebelling against doing such things. I gain a new respect from reading Perez's definitions because they help me see the role of Mexican immigration in post-World War II America more clearly. They help me see how words that have entered the American lexicon came into being.
4. Have I read anything else by the story's author?
At this point, I have not.


The story I wrote is posted to My National Short Story Month blog, which is linked to this site. Here is my assessment of it:
1. What was the story I wrote today? Title, word count, and a 1-2 sentence synopsis.
The story was "Not Indian Like Me." It is 100 words long and is based on a prompt from a site called StoryADay.org to write a "drabble," essentially a 100-word story. Not Indian Like Me narrates a conversation between my mother and myself on Hindus and Muslims following the 1992 destruction of the Babri Masjid, a sixteenth century mosque that once stood in Ayodhya, India.
2. Where did the idea for this story originate?
The story is drawn from my book manuscript.
3. How did the story develop?
I followed the guidelines for writing a drabble, which were to choose one or two characters, and let a single moment, action, or choice unfold. The drabble is supposed to hint somehow at how the singular moment is more significant than the characters realize at the moment. Because this story comes out of a book manuscript, writing the drabble was not difficult. I did find myself having to distill it, however, from about 350 words in the manuscript to 100 in order to follow the rules.
4. What might I do to this story later to strengthen it?
I chose this particular story because my husband had suggested last fall that it sums up what my entire book is about. The closing line "You cannot understand. You are not Indian like me." hints at the significance. It comes late in the manuscript, in the second to last chapter. But as I consider it, it reiterates tensions that are apparent throughout the manuscript. Because I am writing a non-fiction narrative, the timing of the scene also is significant. It occurs as I am a young adult, and am beginning to look critically at what it means to be an Indian in the U.S. for the first time. In revising, I might replace the text I distilled with this particular story so that it "pops" out of the narrative quite clearly and then step back to analyze the statements and their implications.

Thursday, April 18, 2013

How do I know if I'm getting any better?


       
The past month of challenges -- write 750 words a day, create a poem a day -- has energized my writing and brought into it and my own soul a sense of the daring and reckless. I feel inspired and refreshed. Yet, I also have questions. I know this is raw material and I am passing it off as such. But, should I be posting what is so raw so publicly? What will I need to do best to make my writing get better? How I can self-improve?

As I ponder these questions, I realize that they echo questions that students ask, as they pump me for feedback. What can they do to become better writers? What are they doing right? What are they doing wrong? How can I help steer them in a direction that makes it all right?

The questions plague me like the feeling of "Stage-Fright" that my first contribution to this blog spoke of. To be honest, they scare me because one of the simplest responses is, "How do I know? Who am I to know?" Those responses, I realize, probably don't do much to ease the anxiety of a student who has learned to trust teachers as sources of answers, as authorities, as coaches, as experts, as people who can provide the solutions to the problems that vex us most.

The confrontation of student expectation with instructor stage-fright came to a climax in my mind recently as I encouraged students in my digital-storytelling course to see storytelling as a creative process that relies upon community input. There is no one right way or wrong way to tell a story, I said. Only suggestions and ideas, based on one's own personal idiosyncrasies and insights. Furthermore, the way in which a story is going to be told will vary, depending on the community for whom the story is being put forth.

I had written those words in an online course bulletin board as a way of encouraging and empowering students to take seriously the peer advice they were receiving from one another, advice that, for the most part, was supportive and helpful. There was a layer of guilt added to the words, in that I was late in delivering my own feedback, probably in part due to Stage-Fright. But seriously as I thought of peer review, I really wanted the students to understand themselves to be a part of a community of learners in which authority was not hierarchical despite the indisputable fact that the course did have instructors (who would eventually become grade givers). Furthermore, I had seen the effects of too much instructor input: good ideas that didn't have a chance to develop were stifled; a style that was coming out in a cautious, playful, exploratory way would be prematurely critiqued. These experiences have been helping me understand that the best advice that students could receive would be to listen to themselves and to learners in similar positions as them.

But peer review doesn't create self-review in and of itself. It doesn't help any of us cut to the question of how to make our own writing better. It doesn't really help us understand what to do with those freshly-pressed, very raw and precocious first drafts.

So I have decided to embark on an experiment in teaching myself self-review. I will do my best to document this experiment through two tried and true tools: the practice of writing at 750words.com every day for a month (the month of May), and the practice of what I called self-assessment for students and Julia Cameron refers to in one of her best primers on writing, The Right to Write, as the evening check-in.

Here's how I hope the experiment will work: May is National Short Story Writing Month -- or so I've been told. It is much less structured than the well-known National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in November and the National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) in April. Some searching for sources over the past couple of weeks have told me that some organizations consider March to be National Short Story Writing Month, and some mark the heralded month as April. Others consider May to be a worthy month for reading, rather than writing, short stories. And some just want you to write a story and post it somewhere to share.

While I have written short stories in fictional format, non-fiction remains my genre. So the fact that my quest to find a storytelling community to help me through National Short Story Writing Month turned fruitless provoked some anxiety.

What I decided is this: In May, I will read one short story a day. And I will assess it by answering the following four questions:
1. What was the story I read? Title, author, place where it was published, and a 1-2 sentence synopsis should be provided.
2. What were three strengths and/or insights that I gained about storytelling and writing from this particular story?
3. How do the strengths/insights I gained support my own efforts to improve my writing?
4. Have I read anything else by the story's author? How does this particular story fit or not fit with the author's general body of work, as I understand it?

I also will write one story a day. And I will assess that story, with these four questions:
1. What was the story I wrote today? Title, word count, and a 1-2 sentence synopsis will be provided.
2. Where did the idea for this story originate?
3. How did the story develop?
4. What might I do to this story later to strengthen it?
If you're an educator, you might recognize a few traces of Bloom's Taxonomy in these questions. I have been using the levels of learning established in that matrix -- memorizing, understanding, applying, assessing/analyzing, evaluating, and creating -- for the past several years to create learning activities for students, including questions of self-assessment. While I feel that the process is a bit mechanical, I feel that it works in the sense that it allows students and their instructors to create a dialogue on the student's learning that is less hierarchical and more collaborative. I continue to study and work with the method. My hope is that others might join me in this May experiment, and perhaps report to me on their learning.
(On the image: It comes from a blog on online college courses, and offers a more structured and deeper understanding of self-assessment and its value to students than I can offer here. Visit the blog at http://www.onlinecollegecourses.com/2011/11/21/self-assessment-charting-your-own-progress/

Friday, April 12, 2013

What's raw is not all bad



I wasn't sure I would be writing anything at all today because I was scheduled to have my last two wisdom teeth extracted. However, I signed myself on for two April challenges, one of which is to contribute a minimum of 750 words a day for every day in April to a site called 750words.com and the other of which is to write a poem a day in honor of National Poetry Writing Month and to make the poem public, which I'm doing at the blog linked to this site at http://guptacarlsonnapowrimo2013.blogspot.com. I couldn't bear the "agony of defeat" and even considered waking up at 5 a.m. to do the writing in case I didn't make it, post-surgery!

Well, the alarm went off at 5 a.m., and the snooze button was hit. Happily, the surgery went well and by about 7 p.m., I felt well enough to sit up in what my husband describes as my "blanket pod" on the sofa, with my laptop. I have been using 750words.com to work on my book manuscript and two book chapters for other projects that I need to finish revisions on. What I wrote today had more to do with writing practice, however, so I thought I would share it here. There is a small amount of repetition in what I've placed in previous posts, but I think the general idea of "what's raw" is not bad comes through.

I started doing morning pages in October 1998, and read the Artist's Way by Julia Cameron a couple of months later. Initially, Cameron's depiction of morning pages didn't sit well with me, and I stopped doing them or did them at best sporadically for several months. My initial impression of the theory behind the pages was that I could use them to process work-in-progress: things I was reading, ideas I was having to synthesize the readings, thoughts that would emerge from the numerous conferences, lectures, book readings, and my work with tai chi and yoga at the time.

Years and years later, this is how I use morning pages: to process thoughts, ideas, projects, ongoing work. Some days, they are mental dumping -- I need to rant about my lack of money; I need to vent suppressed anger about something; I need to write out about something that is anything but the project breathing down my neck at the moment. I also realize that I think this is what Cameron has in mind with morning pages. I have gone through the Artist's Way several times, and even incorporate parts of it into my teaching. I also have worked through Walking in this World, The Right to Write, and The Sound of Paper. So clearly I find value in Cameron's work, and also appreciate that her approach doesn't sit well with everyone.

One challenge that morning pages does present is the act of longhand writing. I believe in it. Deeply. There's something about the audience of self, page, pen, and Great Creator that is special, intimate, and not requiring edit impulses. A lot gets done because it's free-writing, and it's something I can later transfer to a computer file -- giving it the edit impulses (fix the typo, rephrase the sentence, move the paragraphs around) that word processing makes possible in a way that longhand can't. The challenges are making the time to move it to the computer file, and then trying to determine the next step for the work that lies in the computer file. Three pages of longhand, or the rough equivalent of 750 words, does not usually make a full article, book chapter, or essay so using the process of morning pages to get sustained projects done means dealing with overlap, inconsistency, and sometimes complete ruptures or breaks in thought. In addition, time is one of our most valuable commodities. Many days, I write morning pages successfully, have my breakfast, take my shower, and roll into work and am immediately confronted with demanding tasks beyond my immediate control. By the time I think I have a minute to transfer my morning pages to a computer file I'm too pumped up with distractions, breathlessness, and a sense that I need to hurry, hurry, hurry to engage with the edit impulses in a way that I would like. I end up thinking "it's all bad" when the reality is that "it's all raw". It needs the patience of simmer time to gel together.

I was introduced to 750words.com last summer by a colleague, Michele Forte. She was using the site to begin jump-starting her own thoughts on writings she could initiate as a professor in a position finally to realize long-belated aspirations to scholarship. Like morning pages, I started it in fits and starts, and started immediately hitting the delete button on my e-mail notification from "Buster" saying that he thought I should write 750 words today. I thought about unsubscribing, but I also knew enough about my experiences with morning pages that when the time was write, I would commit.

So April is the month of commitment. I am participating in Napowrimo (the National Poetry Writing Month) and have committed to a poem a day. And I am not a poet by training or passion. I just like doing it once awhile. I plan to participate in National Short Story Writing Month in May, and hope to invent some other "national" genre-writing months (no fantasy or sci fi, though) all the way through the famous November National Novel Writing Month, which I joined three times and failed twice. With these commitments, I also decided that I was going to commit to writing 750 words a day in April. And that if it worked, I would continue into May, June, July, August, and eternity. I thought I would use 750 words as a way to convert my longhand morning pages (because I honestly cannot imagine going without them any longer) to that first electronic file, where editable impulses are allowed.

A lot of my friends laugh at my obsession with challenges. Besides writing challenges, I participate in things like "Complete a Marathon in a Week," "Do an Ironman in a Month," and month-long "Squat-a-thons". I also initiate things like six-week challenges to get more fit, exhorted my friends on Facebook every day in 2011 to move their bodies, and am currently training for an Olympic Distance Triathlon in August and what will hopefully be my tenth marathon in September. I feel a little guilty myself that I lean so heavily on challenges, and feel a little out of it when there is no challenge beckoning me on the horizon.

So why do I them do?

One simple answer is this: Because they're fun. For me, they keep me motivated, and they remind me that with the frantically crazy work hours I keep, 11:59 p.m. and 12:01 a.m., the bookends of a day approach quickly. My hope for the ideal life is write in the morning, work and work out until about 7 p.m., have a good dinner and downtime with my spouse, and write at the end of the day. The challenges force me to remember that end-of-day commitment.

(A note on the photo: I found the image via a Google Images search for "writing raw". The page to which it links is a useful site on writing tips and strategies, one of which is "Free Write Fridays." The image accompanies an interview with Rebecca Tsaros Dickson and has some helpful thoughts on the values of writing in the way that the challenges I describe in this post present. You can access the link at http://kellieelmore.com/2012/11/09/fwf-free-write-friday-writing-raw-with-author-rebecca-tsaros-dickson/.

Saturday, April 6, 2013

Art and craft


I had the opportunity today to meet up with a former journalism colleague and friend, Michael Fancher. Fancher was the executive editor of the Seattle Times when I worked there as a staff writer from 1988-96, and continued to serve at The Times before retiring as editor-at-large in 2008. Since his retirement, he has been teaching journalism ethics and considering ways to re-imagine the practice of journalism for the 21st century. He was in Saratoga Springs for a New York Press Association conference, and when I noticed his status update on Facebook attesting to this point, I e-mailed him to see if he might have time for coffee. I was delighted when my cell phone rang a few minutes later.

I was interested in talking with Mike (whom we called Fanch) because I, too, have been interested in how mainstream journalism might evolve away from its often corporate-controlled and rather elitist tradition of disseminating "news" to readers from the top down and more toward a  democratic partnership of sorts in which the defining and creation of news is more of a collaborative act. New communicative media such as blogs, Twitter, Facebook and shared documents via a variety of Google sites have clearly been redefining how people get information and what (and who) might constitute expertise. These are deep issues of a philosophic nature, in my mind. And, at the risk of being accused of "burying my lede" (a journalistic way of saying get to the point, for god's sake), I am going to state now that those issues are not what I'm going to write about in this blog post, though I think they do influence what I am about to say indirectly. What I want to talk about is how my conversation with Mike made me think anew about how one might learn to be a writer.

The simple answer: There is no way to learn how to write. One learns simply by writing, writing a lot of words.

So, a little bit of back story: A few weeks ago, I described how the fact that some people would be praised for having a "god given gift for writing" used to unnerve me, at least partly because no one made that claim about me. To answer the question of why I was writing if I didn't have "the gift," I created two categories of writers: Those who did it as an art, and those who did it as a craft.

Now the difference between writer = artist and writer = craftsperson is loaded, politically and socially. It evokes comparisons between what is often regarded in an elitist sense as "high art" (the stuff you find in places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art) and what is condescendingly referred to as "low art" (graffiti on a subway train, a mural on a public wall, decorative masks, costumery, embroidered handbags, and pretty much anything one might create to brighten up a day or display a flair for the original). I found it somewhat comforting to be not the "artiste" but the craftsperson. Claiming the latter moniker, I felt, allowed me the right to make mistakes, write some really bad stories that would need extensive editing, and devote some time and energy to working on my craft, honing my skills, trying to become better. I could learn to write, in short, by writing. Not by claiming myself as already perfect, as artiste.

Fanch spoke of a journalists creed that was written by Walter Williams at the well-regarded University of Missouri School of Journalism in the early years of the 20th century. The statement, which can be accessed at http://www.rjionline.org/news/walter-williamss-journalists-creed, briefly describes journalism as an occupation of the public trust. Fanch has dissected and disseminated thoughts on the creed extensively since his retirement from The Seattle Times, in an effort to work toward development of a creed for the 21st century, and shares his thoughts periodically via his own blog at http://mikefancher.wordpress.com. What he had to say about the 20th century creed was this: A fair amount of the creed deals with the skills a journalist might hope to acquire; the remainder is about things that we don't talk a lot about. Those things include an understanding of the society in which one lives; a commitment to engagement in a particular way about that society; and a sense of ethics in terms of how one might engage appropriately.

As Fanch spoke, I started thinking about how I write and how I teach. I started to wonder if perhaps there were different levels of teaching associated with the art of writing. Notice, please, my use of the word "art". It is deliberate. There is the teaching of the skills: crafting a sentence, organizing a story, developing characters, creating dramatic tension and conflict to advance a plot, writing dialogue, constructing scenes, and so on and so forth. Tons of books on how to master writing skills have been published. Most of them ultimately highlight the need for practice. Along these lines, the art of writing ultimately is about craft. You can study stories written by others, masterpieces of the past. But to learn how to write such stories, you must write them yourself. That realization is often frightening for those who think of the art of writing as an art, in the "artiste" sense alluded to earlier. It's much less intimidating if you think of writing as a craft, as something where you're allowed to make mistakes, write really badly, get your work all marked up, and see each new story that you craft as a step toward getting a little better.

But what is the other level associated with the art of writing? Is there more to learn than skill? Fanch's interpretation of the journalists' creed suggests there is, and that other level might be the art of the art, in a more relaxed, more humbling way than the artiste level might indicate. To restate the creed, to write well, one must connect with readers. One does this partly by understanding the society in which one lives. One also does this by making a commitment to engage with that society in ways that are socially appropriate to one's own sense of self and that self's relation to one's place in the world.

To put it more simply, one of the ways that I often engage with the world is by speaking up. But when I'm in a space that feels new or unfamiliar, I am happiest if I can simply skulk in a corner and hang out. This might seem like disengagement, but the reality is that it's not. It's a form of listening and watching -- both of which are information-gathering practices in their own right. These acts of engagement and studies into the society with which one interacts are ultimately journeys of the self into spaces of discomfort that might lead to discoveries and transformation. That, in a way, is what the art of writing is about.

Can you get to the art without the skills? Can you master the skills but never find the art? On the first question, I am fairly convinced that the answer is no. As I write about the art, I feel I am writing about it as an abstraction. It's something that is understood more and more as one's skills develop. Regarding the second question, I find it difficult to believe that focus only on skills will never lead to art. But, to be honest, I am not sure what the answer is. If it were yes, my original belief that you could separate writers into those who did it as an art and those who did it as a craft would be affirmed. But, if it were not, we might need a different understanding of what art is altogether.

To return to journalism, that sense of a need for a different understanding of what defines the journalist and the work of journalism is what seems to intrigue Mike Fancher. It intrigues me, as well, perhaps for different reasons. What would happen if all embarked on a mission to practice and refine our skills while simultaneously entering into a pact to immerse ourselves fully and actively with the worlds in which we live?

(A brief note on the image: I found the image at the top of this post via a Google Images search. In trying to secure an appropriate credit, I discovered that the photo comes from an arts supplies store. It appeared in the Google search after being used on a blog about making money in what is called the Variety Arts. The particular post that it illustrated speaks in some ways to the questions I raise here. Check out the post at http://www.bradweston.com/wordpress/what_is_art/.)

Monday, March 25, 2013

The Power of Story

I saw the film "The Central Park Five" over the weekend, compliments of the Saratoga Film Forum, a grant-supported, volunteer-driven organization in Saratoga Springs, NY, that brings one of more independent new releases, classics, foreign and/or documentary films for an affordable screening to the small town every week. This film was part of a public interest series that the forum has initiated, in which members of the public are treated to a panel discussion by local experts on a particular issue following the screening of a film.

I didn't stay for the panel discussion, but I did find the film to be riveting. Directed by Ken Burns, the film documents how detectives in the New York Police Department more or less coerced a false confession out of five teenaged boys in 1989 of raping the woman who has come to be known as the Central Park jogger. (The five are pictured above in a 2012 photo taken by Michael Nagle for The New York Times. A link to a story about the lingering effects of the case and the film is here:
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/11/19/justice-and-the-central-park-jogger-case)

Watching the film sent a series of flashback memories racing through my head. I was a staff writer for The Seattle Times in 1989, and remember feeling a little queasy about how the press coverage of the New York dailies I had so deeply admired unfolded. The police said the boys were guilty and so the press quoted the police, without further ado. That was standard journalistic practice. I was quite young then, as a journalist, a writer, and a person. So I accepted what the New York daily writers did as standard practice. But it didn't feel quite like the story.

I also was reading the novel Eva Luna by Isabel Allende around that time. The basic story line involves a girl who grows up to become a mystical, magical realist storyteller who, living in a police state, uses magical realism to create stories about the truth that contest the truth being delivered by a heavily censored press. While it was never explicitly stated, the novel's narration implied that most of the public -- without actually admitting it -- knew how to separate fact from fiction. I sort of thought, maybe naively believed, that most American readers could make the same distinctions when they read the decisively certain truths being presented about the alleged Central Park jogger's rapists in the oddly inconsistent reports from the boys, if nothing else.

Other memories conjoined in my head, savoring the benefit of historical hindsight: Spike Lee's film "Do the Right Thing" was released in 1989, and many mainstream movie theatres were afraid to screen it, out of a fear that a fictional story that seemed so potentially jarringly real would generate race riots. An African American liberal was running for mayor of Seattle, as was an African American liberal in New York City. Yet, African Americans were seen popularly as whiners responsible for their own lower socioeconomic status in life, or as fitting the widely circulated Reaganesque prototype of the welfare queen.

Later that year, both Norman Rice and David Dinkins were elected the first African American mayors of their respective cities. And, in Seattle, a white-dominant coalition of parents managed to get a referendum on ballots that kept the inner-city -- well, not racially divided because Seattle is remarkably interracial but racially un-mingled at the basic elementary and secondary educational sense. Just another year later, an amateur videomaker captured footage of Rodney King being beaten by Los Angeles police. A year after that, riots erupted across the country after a white-dominant jury held that the police acted in an acceptable manner. And, one year after that, scores of minority youth cheered O.J. Simpson as he eluded police following his alleged involvement in the death of his estranged wife.

Most of these stories are true, even if they seem to be the stuff of fiction. Allowing them to come into a conversation with each other in my own head reminded me of the value of writing and storytelling. The tales that are not going to be told by the mainstream will not ever be told -- unless we tell them ourselves. 

The boys all spent time in their late teens and twenties in maximum security prisons. In 2001, the "real rapist" confessed. Public pressure mounted, and the convictions were vacated, restoring to the boys who were now men a sense of personal integrity but not the years of life they had lost. A civil suit against the City of New York remains unresolved.

"It could happen here," muttered my husband, as we left the theatre.

Of course, it could. If there's anything, however, that might forestall that possibility, it might be the power of story.

Monday, March 18, 2013

Where I began

One premise that I hold about blogging relates to the term from which Blog is derived, Web-log. A log implies a journal that should contain serial entries, delivered over time.

I promise to stick to the "rule" in future contributions. But now that I've finally gotten over Stage Fright, I'm going to plunge in with a first post.

I spent Saturday reading Floor Sample, a book that self-help writer and artistic recovery specialist Julia Cameron describes as her creative memoir. I have been following Cameron's prescription for writing Morning Pages -- three pages of longhand each day, penned ideally in the morning, first thing in the morning -- since 1998 off and on, and pretty much always on (though I do miss a day here and there) since that fateful moment in 2002 when I threw all previously hard-wired caution to the winds and decided to start calling myself a writer. Over the years, I have gone through the writing and other creative activities in many of Cameron's books: The Artist's Way, Walking in This World, The Right to Write, The Sound of Paper, and The Vein of Gold, among them.  I have adapted some of her activities for my own students who have enrolled in classes ranging from Educational Planning Workshops to Introduction to Political Science. Recently, I became aware of an online program 750words.com that is modeled after the daily Morning Pages concept. I also have been aware of the disdain that Cameron attracts from many people, some of them successfully published writers in their own right: New Agey, flaky, a waste of time, not about art at all are a few snide critiques that I've heard, with one person asserting that Julia Cameron -- like supposedly Nancy Drew series creator Carolyn Keene and cookbook author Betty Crocker -- wasn't a real person at all.
 
I had been interested in reading Cameron's memoir for all of these reasons, including the intriguing possibility that this author and developer of so much empowering and practical writing advice might not be a "real person" at all.
 
Two Empire State College students enrolled in January 2013 in independent studies on memoir writing with me. This created an opportunity to blend work with pleasure, and to satisfy my own curiosities. I assigned them both Floor Sample among other texts.
 
One of the students -- unfamiliar with Cameron's processes -- called the text heavy slogging. The other one has found Morning Pages to be a healing and enjoyable process but has had little to say so far about Cameron's memoir. I found that the text was a relatively fast read because it incorporated much of the personal story that is loaded into the text of the other books. But I found that it also offered some understanding about how she created her methods of morning pages, daily walks (which other authors of writing books such as Brenda Ueland also advocate), and weekly artist's dates. I was surprised to discover that she treats her own Morning Pages as more than just stream-of-consciousness writing but sees a three-pages-a-day regime as a way to produce 90 pages in a month, a full draft of a screenplay in six week, and me, doing my own math, a 240-page draft of a book manuscript in less than three months.
 
The method behind the process is a practice that Cameron describes as "listening." The book you want to write, the film you want to create, the sculpture you imagine: All these are already made. The task is to let a "something" -- sometimes, she calls it God, sometimes The Great Creator, and sometimes the "something" -- create it through you.
 
Cameron is a recovering alcoholic, and models her methods after the Twelve Step recovery approach created by Alcoholics Anonymous. She asserts that letting go of her addiction to alcohol made the listening easier. As I read the text, I started to think about how "listening" seems somehow to equate to the moments when Stage Fright disappears and prose begins to flow. It's sort of a blend of the Knowledge of Brain plus Knowledge of Heart that I alluded to in my Stage Fright post.
 
On a personal note, I quit drinking alcoholic beverages in mid-December 2012. Reading about Cameron's issues with alcoholism as well as other recovery stories causes me to think that I wasn't in a perilous state. However, I did feel that my enjoyment of wine and other libations was taking over my life, and that the clarity that might accompany non-drinking would help me write more and help me write better.
 
I felt the clarity almost immediately. But I didn't feel the more and the betterIn fact, I didn't think I had been writing at all. But then ...
 
Reflecting on Floor Sample prompted a projects inventory. In the three months that have elapsed between mid-December 2012 and the writing of this post, I have completed the following:
1) A book review
2) A book chapter for an edited compilation
3) A detailed eight-page single-spaced response to a book publisher on proposed manuscript revisions
4) An internal report on a matter of college business
5) Four lengthy contributions to a second blog that I maintain entitled Moving Your Body
6) Three conference proposals
7) A detailed layout for a two-hour workshop that I co-presented with a colleague on March 15 on "The Poetics of Sustainability".
 
Looking back, I think I had envisioned "life after alcohol" as a sort of mythic 48-hour day that would let me write and write and write for 24 hours and carry out my business-as-usual for the remainder of that expanded day. Reality: The day didn't get any longer and I didn't write any more than I usually wrote over three months. But I did bring more projects to completion. And the writing did seem to receive external recognition for its quality, suggesting that perhaps it indeed was "better": The book review was promptly accepted for publication; the book chapter, which was conceptual, came back from the editors as strong and with some very helpful suggestions for revision; the book publisher praised the eight-page response as thorough, detailed, and a sign of my ability to produce what was required; the internal report was praised for its quality; all three conference proposals have been accepted; and the workshop was met with success and a possibility for a new, creative work.
 
Morning pages, of late, have stretched beyond three pages of longhand, in four, five, sometimes six pages. Looking at the accumulation of 8-1/2 x 11, college-ruled notebooks, I see the next challenge that faces me is to transfer the longhand to computer files. The issue of morning pages being longhand and "stream-of-consciousness" (meaning that writing about your cat's cute antics is as acceptable as work on that essay that was supposed to be done, oh, say, two weeks ago) is one reason why some writers deride morning pages as "a waste of time." The argument is a good one: If your day only has 45 minutes available for writing, why in an age of computers waste it on time with a notebook and pen?
 
I believe that the value of morning pages lies in listening. The pages offer a chance to do a first draft that is not even really that. It's a pre-draft, or what Kwok Pui-lan (a professor of theology and veteran blogger and book author) calls the "zero draft." It's the "before" of formality, the opportunity to put the knowledge of the heart into words that the knowledge of the brain can understand and integrate with the words that come from research and study.  It's one of the ways, perhaps, to lessen the stage fright before the performance.
 
I titled this post "Where I began." A bit of history might help: I practice tai chi ch'uan, as well as yoga and many sports including running, bicycling, swimming, and walking. I was fairly active with a tai chi group in Honolulu from 1995-2001, and met up with a member of that group one evening for a banquet in 1998. He asked me how I was doing. I responded that I was working so hard that I did not have any time to think, and that that was okay because I enjoyed the hard work. He looked at me long and hard and said, "Three pages, longhand, every morning." I said, "You're crazy."
 
The next morning, I woke up. I did my tai chi warm-up, and thought, "Three pages, longhand. That's crazy." I then picked up a notebook and began to write.
 
Three pages later, it felt a little less crazy.
 
Fifteen years later, it doesn't feel crazy at all.